The General's Bride

by M F Sullivan

  Response was impossible. As much pain as had surged through her at Lazarus’s abrupt removal of her teeth, this pain was far beyond that. Not to mention totally foreign. The terrible, salivating itch began in her gums; its tear-provoking cousin emitted from her sinus cavity to consume the entire right half of her face in a quake of pain whose epicenter was her eye socket. As she thrashed free of the old man amid the terrible confusion of presumed betrayal, the General could not even reach for a weapon over the fiery screams of her nerves, and would only have thought to shoot herself to end the agony, anyway. She touched her gums, home of that pain with which she dared interfere—and the hard buds of new teeth cut through the tissue to meet her touch. Mouth widening in astonishment, the General rolled the gaze of her good eye toward Lazarus while the Lady, with gentle amusement, observed, How afraid she is.

  The mystic nodded. “Like a cat, at the veterinarian.” Basil added a soft bark, a laugh.

  Somehow, Dominia had ended up on her knees, and as she accepted the old man’s hand to be helped up, the pain ebbed into numbing endorphins. She dared not—not just yet—open that right eye, for a strange but welcome pressure increased as an orb bloomed within that too-long empty socket like fruit from the branch of a tree. “This will be my old eye,” she asked. “My eye from before? These are my real teeth?”

  You already know. All information is present upon the surface of a black hole, just as all that you are is reflected within the blueprint of your DNA. Our waters contain your eyes, your teeth, because they are Our eyes and teeth. We have loaned them to you, spirit, to do your duties in the world. Everything you have ever received has only been a loan. In truth, you have no body. In truth, you have only one eye.

  In truth, the Truth was an apt name for the Ergosphere, and it was one that followed her back to Miki’s quarters. Truth could set one free, or be weaponized. Her Father was an expert at using the truth to collar slaves and sow doubt, as he had about Valentinian. The truth had killed Cassandra. The truth had driven Dominia from her home. The Truth, yes, was that her wife, her life, and her eye had been taken from her—and it all seemed fantasy when she looked into the mirror of sleeping Miki’s vanity and her teeth reflected back. Those were fine enough that she laughed to see them: but when, with the easy pace of a burlesque act, she unveiled her long-absent right eye, it glossed in instant tears of joy to find itself back home. Her own eye. Not some artificial toy, some spy developed by the Hierophant. Her own flesh-and-blood eye.

  Or the Lady’s eye, she supposed. Lazarus had stayed behind to speak with Her; otherwise Dominia would have plied him with questions. The only one she had to show was the dog, who had followed her back to the room, and over whom she now bent. “Look,” she said, pointing at her prizes, then laughing softly. At the excited light in the dog’s eyes, she worried he might bark, but the wise animal sat up to kiss her cheek and then, gently, paw the diamond around her neck. Again, the dog looked at her—now with more significance, though his joy was undeterred.

  “Yeah,” said Dominia, “isn’t it wonderful?”

  What else could she say when there was still so much to think about? Basil opened his mouth in that agreeable canine smile, then let the expression fade as he hopped upon the foot of Miki’s bed. The Bearers, who slept in rooms adjacent, had made a cot for the General, and her things had been piled neatly beside. For a time, the General tossed and turned, the chain around her neck something to which she once more needed adapt—especially when she tried to sleep outside her normal circadian rhythm. Unconscious bliss had come with such ease in the Ergosphere, with the help of Valentinian. If only she managed to bring him back with her, as Lazarus had retrieved the water! Dominia had all but forgotten that short stop by the fountain—so early in their trip it seemed a century ago. Why was it possible for the water to come to Earth, or a tulpa, but not a lost soul? Why was it not possible for her to bring Valentinian into the world and save it, but also, for her own selfish interests, have Cassandra?

  Sorrow tightened her throat, and the General relented. She slipped the diamond over her head to place it safely in her satchel. Although it was good to have her wife close again, thoughts of her and concerns for her well-being kept Dominia awake. Were Cassandra there, she would want Dominia to sleep more than she would want her wearing the diamond all night. As she reached within to tuck her wife into bed, the General’s knuckles brushed something cold and hard that she did not recognize. For this, she traded the diamond, and withdrew her hand to see Valentinian’s deck of playing cards.

  As if those would help her sleep! They made her mind rove even wilder, fill with guilt and embarrassment; but, somehow, the hard rectangle of the pack was better than a sleeping pill, exuding from its place beneath her crossed arms a sense of safety. A reassurance that the magician was, in fact, not some dream. That reassurance evoked his voice, which she imagined chastising her: “How could anyone dream up somebody as great as me?”

  Or did he actually chide her? Speak into her ear from the Ergosphere? She had felt the Lady’s voice originated within her own nervous system. Perhaps all experiences with the divine, the otherworldly, were the same. It was all so strange; yet, thinking of the Ergosphere lured her off until, in the predawn hours, the General (who, for the record, was almost certainly struggling with undiagnosed PTSD from her many military experiences) awoke to the frantic shaking of Miki. This left the martyr thrashing about and so violently trying to clutch her perceived attacker that she tumbled from the cot to land face-first upon the floor.

  Hilariously, Miki asked if she was awake. “Well, yes,” she said into the antique rug.

  “Then come to my bed and talk to me! I woke up an hour ago and I can’t get back to sleep. Wait”—she gasped as the General righted herself—“is that your eye?”

  “The Lady fixed it. And Lazarus. Long story. I’m surprised you saw it at all; I can’t keep it open right now.” Drawn to her feet and given a shove in the direction of the real bed, the martyr flopped upon it and somehow did not disturb the dog who snored in enviable peace. “Don’t you want to try to sleep?”

  “I’ve tried. I’m lonely! I’m scared.” The human climbed back into the right side of the bed whose entire surface had been disturbed by fitful tossing. “You know how long it’s been since I was scared of anything?”

  “From what I can tell, I’d be nervous, too.” Not that the martyr would ever do a thing like this. It was an unimaginable level of self-sacrifice: she was already being pressured into sacrificing the one thing that meant anything to her, and even the lives of all her people. To sacrifice herself? She couldn’t picture it.

  As both women ruminated, Miki’s lower lip disappeared. “Will I still exist?”

  The General’s neurons dreamed of the porter’s red hair tickling her neck. “I think you will.” She told Miki about the hotel, and Trisha’s appearance there; the prostitute wrinkled her nose in displeasure after Dominia had finished, whitewashing, of course, the “visitation.”

  “I have to work for eternity? As a desk monkey? I don’t know if I like the sound of that.”

  “I don’t know, she seemed to like it. I think she was the boss. Or she didn’t care what her boss would think. And I wouldn’t call it ‘work,’ what she was doing.”

  Although Miki smiled slightly at that, the smile was quick to fade. “What if it isn’t like that for me, though? What if I lose myself completely? Like, what if I don’t even know who I am anymore? I won’t even know there’s a me that’s afraid…that’s the scariest thought of all!”

  Remembering how, as she wandered in a tiger’s skin, the sound of Dominia’s name on Miki’s lips brought her to her senses, she took her friend’s hand. “I’ll pray for you,” she said. “And you’ll hear me, the way I heard you.”

  “You really heard me,” marveled the human, unbelieving even now. “It’s all so strange.”

  “Cosmic radio signals,” Dominia suggested, positing a metaphor likely to be used by the man pretending t
o be a dog pretending to be asleep. Her head against the silk pillow, she said, “I used to worry death would be that way. That the final one would be a whole lot of nothing. Especially since I didn’t remember the first one—I was afraid it would be like that again. Nonexistence. But now…I’m not sure.” Darkly, she smiled. “Maybe it’s wishful thinking.”

  All those people she had killed over the years! More nameless than named, but the named still too great in number for her sense of shame. She imagined them, all of them, wandering in the dark because of her. Those many victims of cities sieged, like the many starved to death in Tokyo before the last horrific blitz. It was all made up when, in reparations, the Hierophant donated the technology required to move the radio tower, and poured money into the Japanese branches of the DIOX Corporation as if he weren’t just moving investments from one account to another. Everybody won: DIOX had a surge of orders for artificial parts following the war, which was around the time such items first came into mainstream fashion; the Hierophant, Dominia now knew, had his investment returned threefold; and the people of Japan, well, they earned the global right to kill or expel any flesh-eating demon discovered on their soil. They could suit themselves. The martyrs may have been expelled from Japan, but the tentacles of the DIOX company plunged deeper into the brains of the populace with each passing year.

  Dominia had been the misdirection in his sleight-of-hand trick. While the Bitch of Europa turned her eyes on Hunters based in South America and Mexico, and the Family used this as justification to make their way south, DIOX products steadily slithered into the homes and bodies of everyone in the Far East to such extent that Dominia wondered if there was an electronic in the world to which her Father did not have instant access. She had killed many people, but he had control of so many more, and all of them were churned through his system of violence like grain in a mill. She was not a part of his mill, the General: she was his scythe.

  But wasn’t the fate of cut wheat, after the milling, to serve as the bread of higher beings? He had tried to convince her of that. Had tried to claim she was doing the right thing by leading his armies, by striving to please him. That futile striving led to the Black Night, an act of genocide that still haunted infamous Dominia. But that same futile striving led, also, to the moment when she began to question everything she had ever done in the name of her Father. This moment came a couple of decades before Cassandra, and was so simple it seemed nothing—was nothing, for certain, to the Hierophant. That nothing moment had been near the climax of the party after the Black Night, when a raucous feast was prepared with some of the slaughter and food was distributed for free to the rest of the masses. Dominia was several drinks in soon into the affair, which was why, perhaps, when she was finally able to get her Father’s ear near the balcony, she had looked around through all the crowd and asked him, sincerely, “Are you proud of me?”

  He blinked, as if either unprepared for the question, or unwilling to answer it. “For?”

  For! She almost laughed. “For the idea—the South Americans are furious. They’re already planning to strike Mexican soil, just like you want. You’ll have your proper war. I thought it was a good idea.”

  “Perhaps it was—time will tell.”

  He turned away, and she, forgetting herself in all the drinks and the shock of his snub, grabbed his forearm. People nearby turned to look while she implored, “Hey! Can’t you—” Now she did laugh, more a hollow exhalation that ended on a hopeful, high note. “Can’t you tell me, just this once, ‘Good job’?”

  “Good job inspiring me to have all those people killed, Dominia. You didn’t do anything yourself, you know—why, Cicero had more to do with enacting the operation than you. You may be my muse, my dear, my architect, my genius: but if there’s a child I’m proudest of, it would be him.”

  Her mouth had fallen wide as her hand in that second. Now free of her grip, the Hierophant patted her cheek and said, “This is why we don’t pressure our parents to play favorites, princess.”

  There went his back, into the depths of the party. There went Dominia’s delusions about her place in the Family, and her hope that her Father might see her as something more than a grunt. All she had done, all the people she had killed to please him—all to accomplish an impossible task. To please an evil man who had kidnapped her from her home and trained her to throw her life away for him, acting like a doting Father but never quite letting anybody (except his precious priest) get any concrete approval.

  Yes, a tiny straw, but the next night she filed her sabbatical paperwork, and the night after that she was on the plane to Quebec. What a stupid child she’d remained, for two hundred years! But that was testament to her Father’s power. She couldn’t blame herself when she had been so expertly trapped and brainwashed by him; Miki wouldn’t.

  Dominia rubbed her face, then turned over to see her human friend watching her with near-luminous eyes.

  “I don’t think you’ll vanish into nothing,” was what she settled on. The geisha nodded once, tucking her arm beneath her comically oversize pillow.

  “I hope you’re right. I’m so afraid! Maybe I’m egotistical.” While the human laughed, her voice cracked and Dominia realized she wept. “After all, what am I compared to the whole world? I’ve seen too much of it to think I’m more valuable than all those places, all those people. All those people! My people.” The General felt a strange electrical discharge, as if the Lady already welled in Miki’s bosom; but her mortal tears kept the martyr grounded enough to reach for the human, to pat her, then wheeze as Miki threw herself against Dominia’s rib cage.

  “It’s a lot of responsibility, isn’t it! I feel so small. It’s like when you’re a kid, really little, and you think it’ll be this way forever, you know—staying home with Mom, playing when you want. Even if she can be cross sometimes. Then, one day, you realize you have to go to school, and this is the new way it is—the way life really is—forever. Then school becomes work becomes volunteering for the board of your stupid HOA to keep yourself busy so you don’t notice you’re dying. I could see it, all of it, as soon as I discovered what the world was like, and I got scared then, too. Like I am now, but…worse. I put up such a fit on my way to kindergarten! I cried and cried. That was before Mom realized I was a girl so she’d hit me and say, ‘Quit acting like a girl,’ and, of course, I’d cry more. I was jealous of real girls! They got to feel whatever they needed. But I don’t want to feel like this anymore, Dominia! I don’t want to be so afraid. I wish tomorrow would hurry up and come.”

  Lowering her voice in case the Bearers listened somewhere (and, surely, they did), the General said, “You don’t have to do this,” but earned a hiccup of Miki’s displeasure.

  “I do! I’ve waited all my life for this. The world needs it. Me. And I can’t stand the alternative, that nightmare I saw the first morning I was dragged to school. I’m going to die eventually, somehow, anyway. But I guess…this isn’t really death.”

  Thinking of the fresco on her Father’s ceiling, of that blue-clad woman, arms extended, attended by a choir of angels, Dominia said, “It’s assumption. Immortality. Things can’t be immortal here, so that which is destined for immortality has to go…elsewhere.”

  “Yes.” Miki wiped away her tears. “Yes, I guess so. But…I don’t want to forget.” She hiccupped again, and laughed, squeezing shut her reddened eyes. “I don’t want to forget my stupid mom. That bitch.”

  Laughing, Dominia kissed her friend atop her head. “I’m sure you won’t.”

  “I don’t want to forget you. Or”—her lips trembled—“you to forget me.”

  “Nobody,” said the General, trying to stuff away her own emotions to tend to Miki’s, “is going to forget anybody. Least of all you.”

  With a sniff and an emboldened nod, the human calmed at those words as she had been soothed by nothing else. From within the frightened girl, the regular, bossy version peeked out. “You better make sure you get it right this time, idiot.” She fli
pped on her other side to back against Dominia for what was, at best, semi-consensual spooning. “Every time the cycle repeats, I have to go through all this fear again.”

  Yes, sad to say. Every time the unobservable cycle repeated itself, all of this would happen again. Dominia would remeet Miki every time the world was new, and every time, Miki would sacrifice herself. Most times, anyway. The General was sure there had been occasions where the girl prematurely entered her thought-body, or ran away with Dominia, or was somehow killed. And what happened to those worlds? How did they end? It was hopeless, surely. What a terrible thing to imagine, a hopeless world! And what a terrible burden to rest on Miki.

  They had both been unfairly chosen to shoulder these tasks. By the arbitrary cruelty of the universe, Miki had been given the duty of maintaining reality, and Dominia had been given the duty of destroying it. At least, of altering it drastically. Of purging the world of her people, thereby ending it for them. Why was this not the task of someone better equipped? Of Valentinian, the Saint of Death? Perhaps all this was Dominia’s responsibility only because of her originating decision: to choose between him, or Cassandra.

  Now, it was the General’s turn to lay awake. While Miki snored, Dominia turned and, in a bedside mirror strategically positioned across the room from its cousin, saw infinite selves engaging the same turn in an infinity of bedside mirrors. An infinity of Dominias: an infinity of wars, of sieges, of crimes against humanity. Infinite mistakes. How many times had she walked into that room and seen Cassandra blowing out her brains, the same crimson jelly of all the brains the General had bashed from human skulls? That same she’d bashed out of Benedict’s skull, that day he’d come to her with the bright, sky-colored eyes of an innocent boy sent to war and said, “What a book, Tobit!”